Ten AI Models Name Hyperliquid (HYPE) Top Year-End Pick With Six of Ten Votes

Ten AI Models, Two Picks Each

Ten leading AI models were handed a question this week that allowed no hedging: which two cryptocurrencies hold the largest upside between now and December 31, 2026? Grok, ChatGPT Astra, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Claude Opus 5.5, Pi, Qwen 3.7 Plus, DeepSeek, Gemini, Venice and Mistral each had to name one token from the top ten and one from the broader blockchain ecosystem, then run a quality check on its own answer and explain why it beats the field. The format ruled out long candidate lists and ties; every model had to commit to exactly two names for the final stretch of 2026. The question carried weight because the year's leaderboard already reads unevenly: Venice token (VVV) leads 2026 with a 1,541% gain, and FUN, QNT, HYPE, NEAR, JST, PUMP, ORCA and ZEC have all crossed triple-digit returns in the altcoin market. The tally from the panel put HYPE at the front: six nominations, ahead of Solana's five and Zcash's three. Claude Sonnet 5.5 made HYPE its top-ten pick with a $140 year-end target, placing the Hyperliquid (HYPE) price near $93, about 5% under the $98 record and up roughly 270% from around $25 at the start of the year, and named potential US regulatory access for the protocol's perpetual futures market, a core DeFi segment, as its strongest catalyst. Qwen 3.7 Plus chose HYPE as the year's aggressive-growth asset, citing a 146% return and a share above 44% of decentralized perpetuals volume. DeepSeek's Deepthink run went the same way, reporting about 151% in gains and arguing that buybacks funded by protocol fees give the rally a structural, not speculative, character, with the CFTC's push toward regulated US perps access as the decisive driver.

Solana's Five and Zcash's Three

The six nominations rest on a mix of theses rather than one shared argument. Models that picked HYPE leaned on its trading activity and the fee-funded buyback program, while Solana (SOL) supporters pointed to its layer-1 network's coming upgrades and possible institutional demand. Venice AI, one of the five, put SOL down 3.3% year to date at $120 yet up 64% from its August low, naming spot SOL ETF flows and the Alpenglow upgrade as catalysts; its own quality check found SOL stronger on momentum and beta than ETH, down 9%, XRP, down 19%, and DOGE, down 20% this year. Zcash carried the privacy case: Grok called ZEC the top-ten asset most likely to post the largest percentage gain by year-end, up 163% in 2026 to about $1,350 and still far below its $3,192 peak, with the roughly $900 million Grayscale Zcash ETF as the driver. Grok's outside pick was Orca, up 140% with a market cap near $190 million. DeepSeek flagged the unresolved Orchard forgery risk on Zcash as that trade's main hazard. In the wider ecosystem tier, Claude Sonnet chose Near Protocol at a $9 year-end target, up about 230% from around $1.60 in August to above $5, anchored on Bitwise's NEAR spot ETF receiving final approval on September 24. The panel's own closing count conceded that agreement on names ran well ahead of agreement on figures: year-to-date return data conflicted across answers, and descriptions of ETF progress were inconsistent, leaving parts of the reasoning in need of independent verification regardless of how confident each answer sounded. By December 31, the market settles which forecasts were real.

Our reading is that the tally measures model consensus, not anything the market has confirmed. Live monitoring shows the token down 4.1% over the past 24 hours as the picks landed, and the panel's own arithmetic argues for caution: three models backing HYPE quoted three different year-to-date returns, and the catalyst behind several calls, US access for the protocol's perpetuals market, is still a proposal rather than an approved fact. Supply and demand data we track cuts both ways: a 3.75 million HYPE unlock worth $340 million hit the market on October 6, while Grayscale's HYPG fund captured the full $3.37 million net inflow into Hyperliquid ETFs on October 2. Singapore's central bank has separately deemed Hyperliquid outside its regulatory jurisdiction, so the access several models treated as the main catalyst is contested on more than one front. The panel itself separated persuasive predictions from well-grounded ones and left the difference for December 31 to settle.